Sub menu

adults

In his introduction to The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius, Adam Gopnick recounts one of his first experiences with the very essence of Rube Goldberg: the popular board game, Mouse Trap. For those unaware, Mouse…

Did you know that centaurs, mermaids, and harpies really exist, and they’ve been living in secret in Japan? Monster Musume features a Japanese government that has formally acknowledged the existence of liminal species. To foster goodwill between humans and liminals, Japan…

Helen has just moved to rural Wales with her parents. She’s quiet and solitary, but she isn’t shy. She’s the kind of child whose mother must ask her not to bring any more dying animals to the house. Helen loves watching nature…

Sugar Skull is the conclusion of Charles Burns’ trilogy about a troubled young man with an Tintin-esque alter ego operating in a acid-trip fantasy that parallels his real life. In this volume, the grotesque and hypnotizing world of toxic sewage,…

Once upon a time, perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, the world of graphic novels was a much smaller one, with fewer artists getting published, and thus fewer themes being explored and fewer artistic styles being used. Happily, as readers…

Ah, the cartoon illness memoir. It’s a oft-visited territory for cartoonists, though a bit under the radar for many readers—there’s the hilarious and heart-wrenching Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person by Miriam Engelberg, the surreal yet educational Monsters by Ken…

Fatherland is a chilling portrait—a month after reading it, I looked again at the ominous cover image of a smiling, clean-cut blond man, and felt a palpable sorrow. The man is the author’s father, a radical Serbian nationalist whose troubled…

Hell can be many things: a place of endless horrors and punishment, a black abyss devoid of God’s light, or simply other people. The infernal realm has inspired numerous literary works, comics, movies, and video games. An underground realm occupied by a…

Harken back, dear reader, to the days when rockets were cigar-shaped, space suits were skin-tight, and the aliens always had more limbs. Harken back to the days of ray guns and adventure, of utopias with corrupted hearts. Harken back to…

From Thales and Pythagoras to Darwin and Einstein, Science: a Discovery in Comics highlights the big names in the science world. While the book focuses on the history of science, it also covers famous formulas, the scientists behind them, and…

If a single word can be used to describe Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, that word must be “epic”. Ambitious in size, extravagant in scope, twisting in storyline, and published over nearly a decade as a serial from…

It’s important to note that, if a graphic novel has the note “Warning – Nudity and Extreme Violence Depicted” on its cover, it’s a good idea to take that warning to heart. Even with the warning, Peeler Watt’s Monkeywanger: The…

There is a captivating aesthetic at play within the pages of Black Science. At once, it reminds me of the square-jawed, romantic, high science-fiction so skillfully crafted by creators such as Al Williamson (Weird Science) or Alex Raymond (Buck Rogers).…

The James Bond Omnibus 005 is the fifth volume (hence the “005”) in a series of books from Titan Books that reprints the entire run of the little-known James Bond newspaper comic that ran from 1958 to 1983 in many…

Caiman is a decent guy. He may be huge and handy with a knife, but he’d just as soon stuff his face with tasty gyoza from his friend’s shop as he would pick a fight—unless, of course, that fight is with a sorcerer.…

“Across the white immensity of an eternal winter, from one end of the frozen planet to the other, there travels a train that never stops” (p. 3). And so the first volume of Snowpiercer opens, like a macabre picture book.…

In his introduction to Journalism, comics-journalist Joe Sacco makes it clear that while objectivity might be the “Holy of Holies” in American journalism, the medium of comics is, by nature, a subjective form. While he may be able to capture…

You don’t have to be a My Chemical Romance fan to appreciate The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, but it probably helps. The comic is a literary sequel to Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, MCR’s…

It’s easy to be skeptical of a self-published, sketchy looking comic about a dystopian society and its heavy-hearted inhabitants. It’s easy to write it off—and I nearly did. How many near-identical dystopias have we dystopia fans sat through over the…

Erika Moen is a bold voice among women cartoonists—and among cartoonists period. Her webcomic, DAR, illuminated her experiences of being twenty-something, coming out as queer, loving ladies, marrying a dude, and how she discovered herself as a person and an…